


Kill Counts and Asgardian Happy Hours

by DeTaverny



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes deserves nice things, F/M, Like a ride on a Pegasus, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), and a princess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-27 00:02:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20750966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeTaverny/pseuds/DeTaverny
Summary: Bucky reunites with Shuri on the battlefield at the end of Endgame.





	Kill Counts and Asgardian Happy Hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).

The last thing Bucky remembers seeing is Steve's face. He isn't sure what happened, except that he was talking to Steve and pointing at how weird it that his brand-new arm was disintegrating. Then the rot had spread, all the way to the rest of him. Now he's standing beside a tree, the _talking_ tree who'd showed up with Thor and the raccoon shortly, because sure, why not. Steve and Thor, who'd been standing in front of him, are nowhere in sight.

The tree turns to look at him, nodding his branch-like head solemnly down. 

"I am Groot," it says, but in the tone behind the words, Bucky hears an echo of his own confusion.

"Bucky," he says, since he can't answer the tree's actual question. 

A golden circle appears in front of them, showing a scene wildly different from the Wakandan battlefield elsewhere around him. Normally, Bucky wouldn't be such a fool as to walk through an unknown portal—that sort of stupid has always been Steve's M.O., and getting dragged through more of Bucky's—but there's a voice in his head telling him that he'll lose time again if he doesn't, that everyone will lose _everything_ if he doesn't, for real this time. And Bucky can just make out Steve's broken shield, which is all he needs to plunge through. 

The world's biggest armies are assembling on the other side of the portal. There are aliens and more aliens, but Bucky catches sight of Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit, flying above Steve and what Bucky has to assume is the 'good' side. Even without Stark to fly along the line, Bucky's observant enough to pick out the enemy. He recognizes some of them—the same creatures they fought in Wakanda, and the flying things he's seen from footage of the New York attack. It takes him a second to realize that the army of green guys who came out of a portal to his right are friendlies, but otherwise it's pretty clear.

But there's no time to think beyond that, because alien armies don't waste time posturing; they just get right down to the killing.

Bucky doesn't like it, but he can respect it. He gets to work. He just wishes he knew what the key objective is so that he could strategize; killing the foot soldiers, even alien ones, isn't usually the be all and end all. 

He's on his third gun—this weird space battle is great for trying out new weapons, since everyone seems to have brought their own from wherever they came from—when he spots her. 

Shuri was never trained as anything like a Dora, but she's here, like an action hero princess brought to life. Moving faster, shooting straighter, jumping higher. Bucky doesn't understand it, but he does feel his heart beat a little harder, his groin clench more than a little inappropriately. He clamps down on the feeling, like he always does, because this isn't the time, Barnes, he tells himself, if it ever has been. The universe, maybe, is on the line. 

But he can't stop glancing over, making sure she's all right. And she is, he quickly starts to see. Whatever's happened, _she_ hasn't lost time, he's sure of it. It isn't that she looks older, not exactly. She never looked that young to begin with. No, it's more that she seems to have settled into her face, into her position. She moves with greater calm, foresight more than confidence (she already had plenty of that). She moves like a queen, like her mother. 

Steve's got Sam covering his six and Thor and Scott covering his sides. With a pang, Bucky realizes that he isn't needed. Wasn't needed before whatever just happened. Hasn't been needed in that way for a long time. 

But Shuri's got two space monsters sidling up behind her. 

Bucky picks up a new weapon—some kind of laser gun that he remembers pinching from one of the dead monsters in Wakanda—and shoots them between the eyes before they get close enough to breathe on her. 

"Sargeant Barnes!" she yells when she sees him. Her whole face lights up, like it always does when she spots him across a room, across a battlefield. Even now, she doesn't look girlish. She gets off another two shots while he's running over to her.

"How many times do I need to tell you? It's Bucky."

Another set of the monsters approach, cutting the reunion short. 

"Behind me!" he yells at her, grabbing a new weapon so that he has one in both hands. "And give 'em hell." 

She presses her back to his and together, they let loose. Bucky can't help but grin; he still has no idea what the larger story here is, but she's warm against him. He can feel each blast of her arm blasters go off, can hear her little grunts of satisfaction whenever she sees a target fall.

He's never wanted to see her fight, would have preferred to sign up as her own personal Dora, an army's worth of bodyguards in one man, if that would keep her from having to. But if she has to fight, which it seems that she does, because _everybody's_ fighting, he's glad, proud, to see she's good at it. 

"I'm up to eight-seven. What's your count, Bucky?" 

He doesn't miss the acknowledgement of his request to call him by a less formal name. He smiles as he kills another. "A hundred and two."

"Show-off." 

"I'm supposed to be the world's most dangerous soldier. My numbers aren't surprising. What's surprising is how good you've gotten. Last time we practiced was…"

"Now you're just rubbing it in." She wipes her face, and that war paint must be practically bonded on, because it doesn't smudge. She dares a split-second's distraction to turn her head and look at his profile. "I am happy you are back. I have missed you."

"Yeah?" he asks, both because he just talked to her a few hours ago, in the palace, and also because she says the words with a level of feeling he didn't know she felt about him.

"Shuri," he asks between blasts. "How long has it been?"

"Five years."

The answer throws him off his game just enough to momentarily loosen his grip on the gun, but not so much that he lets anyone near them. 

"Did you hear what I said?" she asks. 

"Yeah. I did," he says slowly, still processing. "That's a long time." 

"I know," she says sorrowfully. "What did it feel like for you? I haven't yet had a chance to ask anyone who was brought back."

"It felt like blinking." He shoots a few more and then her words register. "How many of us, uh, blinked?"

"Half of all sentient life in the universe." 

Well, shit, Bucky thinks. That's the overly dramatic non-number Banner and everyone was throwing around while prepping for the battle in Wakanda. Until now, Bucky's been rolling his eyes at the obvious exaggeration.

He wants to ask a million questions, but breaking concentration could mean death, for both of them. Scott's gone huge, and is only slightly less clumsy about it than he was in Germany, so it takes all of Bucky's highly developed spatial intelligence to keep himself and Shuri out of the path of those giant boots. They hide behind a stinking pile of alien carcasses in a spot where the fighting has momentarily thinned. Bucky feels a pang of guilt, because someone like him ought to be on the front line. But Shuri's here, and he selfishly decides to give into what he wants, for once, and put her above everything else, above even half the sentient life in the universe.

The sky lights up and a comet shaped like a blonde rips through the spaceship with impressive efficiency.

Bucky wonders if this woman, whoever she is, shows up late to every party. But when she takes on Thanos, he can't find it in him to complain. 

He and Shuri spend the rest of the battle easily holding off the space dogs, until they vanish, in pretty bursts of ash. 

"That is what happened to you," Shuri whispers, holding Bucky's hand. 

He wonders when she started. 

"You okay?" he asks. 

Her answer is to throw her arms around his neck. She's never done it before—_no one_ except Steve has hugged him like this since, Christ, since his mom on the morning he sailed off for Europe. Bucky feels stiff, but she doesn't seem to notice, because she grips him with her too-thin arms even tighter, face buried in his hair and neck.

Finally, he remembers to put his arms around her, as lightly as he can, because, again, he's never hugged anyone in this body except another super-soldier, and he doesn't know the right amount of pressure to exert on someone her size. 

"Everyone died," she says. "T'Challa, my mother, almost all of the Dora, all of my lab assistants. And you, too."

Bucky notices, as he's noticed before, that she doesn’t mention friends, only family and colleagues. Ever since coming out of cryo, he's noticed that Shuri, while well-liked, doesn't seem to have any real friends of her own. He's wanted to be that for her, but deep down he feels that he's simply a fourth category: a project. 

Only right now, as she's clutching him—the least important person in her life, he's always thought—does he think that maybe he's transcended that for her, and become something more. 

And Bucky's selfish, because he ought to be thrilled, honored. Yet, all he does is wish for one step more. 

"I had to be the queen," she says, and suddenly a lot of things make sense.

"You drank the herb," he breathes as soon as he's worked it out, the explanation for why she's seemed so much stronger.

"Yes, and it tastes, _awful_, by the way. Feels awful, too, though my brother never said anything. I am not made to be a queen or the Black Panther. I am made to be a scientist. It's been a terrible time."

"I'm sure you've been great," he replies, after a pause to reload his gun and dispatch the aliens lumbering over to where they're still crouching. "And, if we survive this, you can go back to your old life, right? Because he's back. We're all back," he says, because he's _just_ saw T'Challa running across the field with that spider kid from Queens. 

The fighting slows down as, one by one, the good guys realize there's no one left to fight. Now there's just a wasteland and a lot of confused people being greeted after a long absence they knew nothing about, just like Bucky's experienced. 

He sees T'Challa and a handful of Dora Milaje nearby. The women embrace their king one by one with an incredibly formal ceremony Bucky's only witnessed a couple of times.

Still holding his hand, Shuri stares between Bucky and her brother. He wonders why she isn't running to T'Challa, given that he was dead and all, when suddenly, she goes on tip-toe and kisses Bucky. Even more than with the hug, he stiffens, but an old muscle memory kicks in. He grabs her by the head and kisses her back. She's in charge, however, and he only lets go when she pulls back for air.

"What was that for?" he asks dumbly.

"I must go to my brother," she says, and then trips off. "Do not linger too long, Bucky. I've waited years already."

* * *

"What are you going to do?" Steve asks a few days later, when he and Bucky are alone in their shared hotel room. 

"When you're gone?" Bucky asks. Because of course he knows, without needing to be told, what Steve intends to do. He can't blame the guy. He isn't angry. He's happy for him. But he's also lost. 

"Yeah. Natasha and I made sure that, even posthumously, you were cleared of everything, by every country's government. I didn't know at the time that we ever might get you back, but it mattered, to make sure people knew, to make sure they understood. You're not a fugitive anymore, Buck. None of us are. You can make your life wherever you want. You can even… you can even come with me, if you want." Steve sounds hopeful, but he's got to know, because he knows Bucky, what the answer's going to be.

"You know I can't, Steve. This is your happy ending. Your do-over." 

Steve pushes his elbows into the meat of his thighs and hides his face in his hands. Bucky knows him well enough to see that his heart is being torn in two; his friend somehow lived for over a century's worth of time without learning a key fact of life—that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. By the time Steve looks up again, he's composed himself, and a ghost of a smile plays along his pout. 

"I guess you've got better things to do than settle quietly in the fifties. You're gonna be a prince." 

"What are you talking about?" Bucky asks, looking way, embarrassed. 

"You think I missed that little scene with the princess?" Steve says with a wink. "You always did manage to get girls who were way outta your league. 

Bucky looked at the floor. "Heat of battle, rush of adrenaline. That's all it was."

"You didn't have conference calls with her every week for five years. I did, pal. And trust me. No one asks that much about a guy who's gone unless… It was nice, by the way. Having someone to talk about you with. She wanted to know _everything_."

Bucky startles at that. "You didn't tell her… everything… right?"

"She was especially fond of the story about our third-grade Christmas play."

"Is that the one where I played the sheep?"

"Fourth sheep from the left. I told her all about it, and she _still_ wanted to kiss your sweaty mug."

Bucky smiles. He hasn't spoken to talk to Shuri since that kiss, hasn't even seen her. Except for the way it still tingles on his lips, he might have made the moment up. It's been a few days since the battle and since Strange sent everyone back where they came from. Everyone but Bucky, who looked between Steve and the golden portal to Wakanda a few times before making his choice. The choice he's always made, for his whole life. 

But now Steve is making a different choice, which opens a new door, a more permanent kind of portal, for Bucky. 

"You're going back, right?" Steve asks, reading his mind. "I saw you in Wakanda. I visited. It's home for you, isn't it? In just a few months, you made more of a home for yourself than I did in twelve years anywhere on Earth. That's something, Buck. For all that's happened to you, you've found something good here."

"I don’t even know if my house is still there. The goats are probably all dead. The children are probably all teenagers."

"Something tells me you won't need that hut." 

Bucky throws a pillow at him.

* * *

The official means of transportation are snarled by suddenly too many people trying to get to all sorts of places, so Steve asks around his superhero acquaintance for who can give Bucky a ride to Wakanda. The options have become a lot more varied in the past five years, not because of any technological advancement, but because of the way the new beings who've started visiting have brought their own. 

In the end, the form of transport that gets arranged for him isn't technological at all. The opposite, in fact. He's going to get to Wakanda on a horse. A flying horse. Steve introduces Bucky to Thor, who in turn introduces him to Valkyrie (whether she's 'a' Valkyrie, or 'the' Valkyrie, or her name is actually 'Valkyrie', Bucky can't quite tell, but it soon doesn't matter because they're both drunk and if he weren't in love with someone else, he'd be head over heels). 

Bucky doesn't stick around to watch Steve leave and not come back. They've said their goodbyes. Instead, he makes sure the last thing Steve sees of him, the image that'll from now on make him associate Bucky with something joyful instead of all the shit that's happened since Brooklyn, is Bucky riding a Pegasus, leaning back and waving a cowboy hat that he bought just for this moment as it takes off. Steve, wearing his white suit and holding Thor's hammer, laughs and laughs until Bucky and Valkyrie are too far away to make them out. It's a good last image of Steve for Bucky to keep, too.

"You're _much_ more fun than I thought you'd be. They told me you were the strong, silent, tragically brooding type," Valkyrie tells him as they fly across the Atlantic. 

"I was, for awhile," he admits, and then adds, "But I don’t think I'll be anymore. I'm going home."

* * *

Bucky had worried, but it turns out that force fields don't work on a Pegasus. They haven't even landed yet and Valkyrie decides that her first project as king will be to get in good enough with the royal family to ask that the Asgardian settlement be allowed to settle here.

"Norway is the pits," she confides in Bucky. "And I've heard a rumor that you might be able to get me in good standing with the powers that be."

"Rumors are over-stating it. I was always a nobody, a sad sack they took in for charity and apology. I don't know what what's going on, or where I stand. For all I know, I'm about to be turned out."

The Pegasus pretty much flies itself, leaving Valkyrie free to turn her head and give Bucky some truly belittling side-eye. 

"You're ridiculous," she says.

T'Challa and Okoye must get a report of intruders from the sky, and have come out to the terrace to see what all the fuss is about. By the time they get close enough to see their faces, Bucky can see that they're smiling. 

"Welcome home, friend," T'Challa says right away, thus dispelling any doubts that Bucky might have had about his choice. 

Valkyrie kicks him in the heel as though to say 'told you so'.

Bucky keeps his promise and speaks glowingly of Valkyrie, but it turns out he doesn't need to, because Okoye's already a big fan. T'Challa promises to entertain some Asgardian diplomats soon.

Valkyrie leaves Bucky with a friendly punch to his flesh shoulder and a bottle of Asgardian liquor. "Call me later. I want to hear _everything_," she whispers.

It's nice to know that he can still make friends. 

"We weren't sure you would return, although we very greatly hoped," T'Challa says. "We would have grieved, yet understood had you decided to make your home elsewhere, now that the world is open to you again, but…"

"There's nowhere I'd rather be." 

"I am glad to hear it. Shuri is in her lab," T'Challa says, out of nowhere. And if he doesn't wink, it's a near thing.

Bucky feels a little weird shaking his hand, knowing that T'Challa knows that Bucky knows that T'Challa is basically giving his okay, not that Shuri's ever needed an okay. But Bucky kind of does. 

The lab is just as he remembers, from a few days ago, from five years ago. It's clear that as soon as she could throw the crown down and get out of her ceremonial corset, Shuri had started spending all her time in here again. She's barking orders at a million lab assistants, and when she spots Bucky, she includes him, too. 

Ever since he got getter enough to help, he was her favorite assistant.

"Took you long enough," she says, and drops a heavy piece of equipment in his arms. 

"I'm here now though."

"Staying?"

"If you'll have me." 

She smiles. "I'll have you."


End file.
